Catherine McKinnon’s last novel, Storyland, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. It’s worth betting that To Sing of War will attract just as much, if not more, critical acclaim. McKinnon skilfully interweaves three separate narratives in a multilayered amalgamation of history and fiction.
Lotte Wyld is a young Australian nurse serving in New Guinea in 1944 where the Australian forces are conducting an operation to drive out the remaining Japanese. Soon after arriving, Lotte runs into Virgil Nicholson, an Australian soldier with whom she shares a fractured romantic history.
The New Guinea passages, set against a vivid depiction of the harshly beautiful landscape, alternate between Lotte’s and Virgil’s points of view. Their tentative attempts at rapprochement are compromised by the senseless savagery of their circumstances.
Meanwhile, at Los Alamos in the United States, Robert Oppenheimer and his team are working frantically to finish building the weapon to stop all war. Conflicted on many levels, these individuals strive to maintain the belief that their purpose is a noble one in the face of moral and ethical dilemmas that threaten to tear their lives apart.
In Japan, a wife and mother, Hiroko, waits for news of her soldier husband. Unbeknown to all, death on an unforeseeable scale moves inexorably towards them. Like rabbits caught in the spotlight of history, these richly rendered characters epitomise the yawning gap between the heroic-seeming panorama of war and the intimate scale of personal lives swallowed up in its giant shadow.
Thanks to the 2006 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin and the recent blockbuster movie it inspired, Oppenheimer’s life is now intensely topical. That he also features as a character in McKinnon’s book gives it added significance, which contributes to, but is far from the only reason for, this book’s powerful impact.
This is a book I didn’t want to end. Its story, characters, settings and portrayal of war’s insidious barbarity are utterly compelling.
Reviewed by Anne Green
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Read an interview with Catherine McKinnon about her book, Storyland
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine McKinnon lives in the Southern Highlands on Gundungurra land with her husband, painter and sculptor Gary Christian.
She teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. Her novel Storyland was shortlisted for five literary awards including, in 2018, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Barbara Jefferis Award and the Voss Literary Prize. Merrigong Theatre has commissioned an adaption of the novel, to be co-written by Catherine and Aunty Barb Nicholson.
Catherine is one of the authors of 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder and was co-winner of the 2015 competition that selected five novellas for publication in Griffith Review 50: Tall Tales Short – The Novella Project 111.
Her first novel, The Nearly Happy Family, was published by Penguin in 2008. Her plays have been produced nationally.
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